Saturday, June 14, 2008

to make use of genome

by Beyond Lab

Human genome is huge. Individual variations are also extremely common. Most of these variations don't have any effect on any function. But some, either by itself or in combination with others, do. What, how, when, and where these variations matter is something we have to know before personal genomics really mean anything.

As one of my earlier posts indicated, some companies, in collaboration with research institutes, have projects on their target diseases or conditions. But that's obviously not enough. We have to know everything - eventually.

So, there is a "genome-wide association studies" from NIH which involves "rapidly scanning markers across the complete sets of DNA, or genomes, of many people to find genetic variations associated with a particular disease". Many diseases are under study now. This sort of "national" or global initiative, like the previous human genome project, is really the drive to our understanding of our genome and therefore could make use of genome information. More detail information could be found here: http://www.fnih.org/GAIN2/home_new.shtml